About the Free Software Directory

One of our most important projects is the Free Software Directory. Janet Casey, the Directory's Maintainer, describes its scope and background.

To make a donation supporting the Free Software Directory and other FSF projects, please visit donate.fsf.org.

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO). It catalogs useful free software that runs
under free operating systems, particularly the GNU operating system
and its GNU/Linux variants.

The Directory maintainer verifies the license for every package in the
directory by opening each package and checking the license of each
source code file. Almost 90% of the packages included are under the
GPL or LGPL, but any package under a license we consider acceptably
free (see this list), that runs on
a free OS, and that does not depend on non-free software can be
included.

The Directory has grown enormously since its inception in late 1999.
It now has almost 3,300 packages, each one individually checked as
described above. The scope of the Directory has also broadened: the
original template for a Directory entry had 30 possible fields; the
current template has 47. Licensing issues with Qt and PHP4 have been
resolved, so packages that use Qt or are written in PHP4 are now
included. Originally, almost all packages had command line interfaces;
now Web-based and GUI packages account for roughly a third of the
Directory.

The Directory accounts for between 40 and 45% of the traffic on the
FSF's Web site; in a recent five day period, it had almost 2.5 million
total hits.